painter

Wesley Hurd

COMPOSER

Eliot Grasso

This exhibition is about struggle, grief, loss and hope. There are times when making art is the only voice we can find to explain human suffering and pain to ourselves.

The paintings present visual forms evoking the unanswerable questions that every human encounters. The works form a visual narrative pictorializing the human experiences of shock, struggle, grief, and lament.

The music is designed to reflect these inner experiences, to give motion and aural texture to our inarticulable responses to intense suffering.

My recent abstract explorations of brilliant color disappeared from these paintings. My use of primary colors came to an abrupt end in the work as I entered into a period of melancholy and sadness. Memories of painful loss and grief emerged in me fostering a compelling need to find new elemental, graphic visual forms for myself.

While much of my composing has been done in a traditional style, I have borrowed the dissonant harmonic language and minimalist techniques of the late-20th century in order to give direction and order to my musical concepts. 

This work is not about the political and ideological. Rather, we are interested in how we form meaning from our experiences of life—good and bad, pleasurable and painful. In the midst of producing these paintings the tragic event at Umpqua Community College happened. The final paintings and music were deeply affected by that event.

These paintings continue my practice of finding abstract forms that evoke and investigate the central subject matter of my art—human interiorty and the human condition in the world as I see and experience it.

At times when our lives are overcome by loss, melancholy and darkness, we grope for ways to cope with its unutterable mystery and pain. The deepest pain is often quiet, lonely and essentially unanswerable.

In our common experiences of suffering and loss we find and see each other in deeper more profound ways. We find hope in the darkness because we have each other.